ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
The Devil and Harper Lee. Mark Seal
Читать онлайн.Название The Devil and Harper Lee
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781645399728
Автор произведения Mark Seal
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
As the funeral winds down, Shirley Ellington’s family members file past her open casket to say their final, tearful farewells. Then comes a teacher. Then her friends. One by one, they gaze into that hideous casket where the young girl lies. Though Ellington’s big, dark eyes are now closed, some must imagine the shock and fear they showed when she looked up at her killer.
Finally, the Reverend rises. Six feet four inches of majesty and dread. Grief, hate, anger, and fear follow him on his long, slow walk to the casket. He lowers his head like a penitent and stares down at poor Shirley Ellington. And then he silently bids her goodbye and returns to his seat.
Suddenly, the wrath of the entire congregation comes pouring out of a young woman returning from the coffin to her seat in the front row.
“You killed my sister, and now you’re going to pay for it!”
The cry comes from Louvinia Lee, eighteen, one of Ellington’s sisters. She is pointing straight at the Reverend, her finger jabbing the air, as the mouths of three hundred mourners drop open.
And then, like a prophecy coming true the moment it is uttered, a man in a green three-piece suit appears before the congregation. His name is Robert Lewis Burns, and everyone here knows him. A member of the extended local Burns clan, Ellington’s uncle. A long-haul truck driver, he was on the road when he received news about his beloved niece’s sudden death. He knew immediately what had really happened. Though a polite and kind man, he was overcome with anger.
Burns turned his eighteen-wheeler around and headed home from Ohio, his fury building with every mile of the 735-mile drive. Now, as he takes his turn at the open casket, the anger boils over. He spots the Reverend in the pew directly behind his own, smiling calmly, almost tauntingly.
Robert Burns climbs atop the pew and stands directly over the Reverend. The two men lock eyes.
Burns pulls a .25-caliber pistol from a holster beneath his green jacket.
He’s heard about the Reverend’s two bulletproof vests, so he takes no chances and aims the pistol directly at the Reverend’s head.
Three shots ring out.
Holes blow open in the Reverend’s nose and temple and the side of his head. His now screaming wife, observers will remember, rushes from her seat to take cover under the pew. Blood splatters the Reverend’s white shirt.
He freezes for just a moment and stares at his assassin, imploring. Then his head falls back and his arms splay out like Jesus on the cross. He collapses in his seat, dead.
• • •
The woman on the train wears the same thing she always wears: casual shoes, slacks, simple shirt. Her hair is cut short and her face is free of makeup. She is single, has never married, never will. She doesn’t fly, due to an inner-ear condition. She hates wasting money, and she has simple tastes, so she would have taken a bus or the subway to catch this train—she never takes cabs. Now, at the start of a 960-mile, twenty-hour ride from Pennsylvania Station, in New York City, to Birmingham, Alabama, she is wedged in her seat among commuters, retirees, and misbehaving children, strangers who likely know her name but not her face. Some of them can probably recite her words by heart.
It’s been seventeen years since the publication of her global bestseller, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Harper Lee hasn’t published anything longer than short pieces since. All this time, she’s been searching for her next book, for a story worthy of being her follow-up to the novel already considered one of the greatest American classics of all time. She is now convinced she has found it, and her opening scene could be a showstopper: the fatal shooting of Reverend Willie J. Maxwell in the House of Hutchinson funeral chapel, on a sweltering summer afternoon when God and the devil squared off in a corner of Alabama.
There it was in The New York Times on June 21, 1977: “Minister Slain … He Is Called a Suspect in Her Death and Four Others,” read the headline, and then came the story, which recounted all the bizarre details.
“Voodoo Man’s Rites Thursday,” read the Associated Press headline.
Surely she read the article in the Times or the thrilling accounts in the local newspapers. She likely also heard about the case from friends and family in Alabama. She couldn’t have missed the wildest crime story ever to come out of her home state.
One thing is certain: She will soon become convinced that the saga of Reverend Maxwell, with all its gore and gothic drama, is another Alabama story that, through her talent, could loom large. She will toil for years over this much anticipated second book, leaving behind a trail of words, agony, wasted time, and unanswered questions.
She is in her early fifties. It is 1977 or ’78, and she lives two lives: February to late summer, she is alone in her small, spartan, rent-controlled apartment, number 1E at 433 East 82nd Street in New York City. September to February, she shares a modest house with her sister Alice in their hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
The cities and towns pass in a blur. Like Jean Louise Finch, best known as Scout in both To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015, the author most likely takes the Crescent Line. It leaves Pennsylvania Station at 2:35 p.m., arrives in Washington, D.C., at 6:20, and then barrels overnight to Birmingham. The train starts and stops, passengers getting off while others get on. “All aboard!” she hears over and over again, throughout the night and into the morning and afternoon of the next day.
She does not need to take this trip. She has won the Pulitzer Prize. She was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Lyndon B. Johnson. She is a millionaire many times over, her book perpetually generating a gusher of royalties, as profitable as a Texas oil well. Soon To Kill a Mockingbird will be taught in a majority of America’s schools and be ranked second only to the Bible as “most impactful book” in a poll conducted by the Library of Congress.
But by now, fame and accolades have become a curse. She has politely refused press interviews since 1964.
“Poor thing—she is nearly demented: says she gave up trying to answer her ‘fan mail’ when she received sixty-two letters in one day,” her lifelong friend Truman Capote wrote in an October 1960 letter, just months after To Kill a Mockingbird was published. “I wish she could relax and enjoy it more: in this profession it’s a long walk between drinks.”
Although she mostly keeps to herself, she can talk a blue streak if the mood strikes or a kindly face appears. Her voice is a husky, southern-fried drawl. In the barrage of questions following her overnight success, she lampooned her thick twang of an accent: “If I hear a consonant, I look around.” With reporters, she had been self-deprecating and shy, but also funny and frank. On her writing technique: “I sit down before a typewriter with my feet fixed firmly on the floor.” On her life story: “I’m afraid a biographical sketch of me will be sketchy indeed … If I ever learned anything, I’ve forgotten it.” On her achievements: “Success has had a very bad effect on me. I’ve gotten fat—but extremely uncomplacent. I’m running just as scared as before.”
“What’s going to happen when it’s shown in the South?” a reporter asked after the release of the movie based on her book.
“I don’t know. But I wondered the same thing when the book was published,” she responded. “But the publisher said not to worry, because no one can read down there.”
In response to the endless questions about her next book, she had this to say: “I guess I will have to quote Scarlett O’Hara on that. ‘I’ll think about that tomorrow.’”
Her first published story after Mockingbird was an essay in the April 1961 issue of Vogue. Entitled “Love—In Other Words,” it was a reflection on the meaning of love.
“Here, for Vogue, is the first article written by Harper Lee, a shy young woman who has an engaging drawl, immense happy eyes and, this year, the pleasure